


Lusters Where With Lusters Flow

by AdvisedPanic



Series: Here There Be Dragons [2]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dragons, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Here there be dragons, M/M, No Endgame Spoilers, Not Avengers 4 compliant, Telepathy, Tony Stark Has A Heart, depression/depressive symptoms, kind of sad sorry, we're doing our own fucking thing buckle up lads
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2019-09-15 13:56:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16934505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdvisedPanic/pseuds/AdvisedPanic
Summary: Tony, Loki, and June have survived a lot of awful shit in the past five years. So, with all that trauma out of the way,  they're starting to settle down: moving into a new home, reconnecting with family, expanding their own little brood.Of course it can never stay that simple.*Or: capital-b Bullshit goes down way too quickly, who knew the terrible-twos could start literally from day 1, and the past always seems to come back to take a whopping chomp out of Tony's unsuspecting, well-sculpted ass.





	1. Matchstick's Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> WE BACK
> 
> first off, THANK YOU for coming back, for checking this out for the first time, for reading, for the support and love and comments and kudos!! I'm glad my little project can touch so many people and shit, son. just thank you
> 
> Second: this fic is NOT stand-alone. If you don't want to be totally lost, go and read (or skim through) the first in this series!! 
> 
> Thirdly, I have Plans for this fic, so get ready for a wild ride. Not as world-ending as Whispers, but we're going places! Angsty places. And it's starting here, chapter 1, lets go beetch. If you're not one for that kind of stuff, this fic might be better read once it's mostly done so you can skip through the sad parts. lots of sad here. my bad
> 
> nanowrimo kind of failed me, since i ended up scrapping a lot of what i did there, but hey, it got me here, which is ten times better than the opening of the first draft :D
> 
> and of course I hope you enjoy!!! posting will happen a little sporadically at first, since I'm just finishing up my undergraduate degree this week (graduating on sunday!!) and have a bunch of shit to do after, but i'll keep it up! comments and ideas and kudos are my fuel 
> 
> xxxx

Tony wakes as Loki does.

His partner slips out of bed, padding quietly to the bathroom and suppressing a yawn. As Loki passes, the passive magelight orbs he’s littered across the room and in the air blink into life in a wake, soft light floating about their bedroom in little firefly spirals. Tony lets himself fall back into a soft doze as the shower turns on and Loki conducts his early morning routine.

There’s barely any light outside, but the Manhattan lights are dimming as the morning comes beneath them. Tony turns on his other side, yawning a bit, as the shower turns off and Loki emerges, hair dried from some superfluous spell and skin pinked from the hot water. Tony watches him get dresses through half-closed eyelids, smiling when he smooths the wrinkles free from his shirt.

“Today’s the big day,” Tony murmurs as Loki comes back to the bed and leans over Tony, pressing a kiss to his forehead.

“Mm,” Loki agrees. “Go back to sleep for now. I’ll get June on one flight there and back before we’re ready for getting us all there.”

“Sure thing,” Tony replies, already half-asleep. He sees Loki smile, feels it in the second kiss against his skin, and feels at peace—just for a moment—as he slips back into rest.

*

Tony wakes up when it’s light out. He stretches, languidly, and slowly rolls out of bed, yawning as he heads to shower and get dressed.

He feels Loki in the back of his mind, awake and slightly distant; he must be at the compound, or just heading back. They’ve finally completed enough of the construction of the upstate compound that they can move in today—and it came just in time, since June has been complaining about being too cramped in the tower for three months now.

Tony finishes collecting up his most personal items and tucks himself in the living area to wait for June and Loki to return. Váli wakes up sometime after his second cup of coffee and lays down right next to him until he lifts up his arms to let her lay her head on his lap.

“Hey, honey,” he says. He scratches at her crest until she purrs. “Feeling good?”

A sensation of contentment—cool sheets sliding against his mind—spills into him. Worry bubbles up as Váli doesn’t respond further than that.

“Váli,” he calls. Her black eyes open and the iridescent rainbow colors shift and shine as her eyes turn to him. “Can you use your words?”

A pause, and then Váli hums, and a negation—cold, silky, a little sharp (but not meanly so)—slides from her to him. Tony sighs as her eyes close and she settles down for a nap right on top of him.

Váli…hasn’t progressed any further verbally than she did at six months. She told them her name, twice, and hasn’t spoken a word since. Even Loki, the one with whom she holds the strongest bond, can’t get her to speak—she only sends them emotions, packets of them, with images or sensations alongside. June is still searching through Shi’s memories for an answer as to her halted development but hasn’t shared her findings with them yet.

Thinking of Shi makes the scent of burning flora appear in his nose and the sensation of dry ash on his forehead return to him, all at once. They burned Shi’s body two months before, after the great, ancient creature died in his sleep. It had taken an entire week for the whole of him to burn.

He sighs. Now it’s only the Space egg to find, of the Infinity Dragons. Time and Power are out of their reach for a long time now—Tony, certainly, will never see them born again. Loki might. He smiles, thinking about his beloved keeping an ever-watchful eye upon the next generation of hatchlings, carrying with him Tony’s memories and his ashes, until they meet again at the side of a bronze-golden egg.

 _Sentimental again?_ Loki asks, his voice tinged with warmth.

Tony chuckles to himself. _Don’t tell anyone._

Loki’s mind embraces his briefly before he says, _June and I are on our way home. Are you and Váli ready?_

_Váli’s asleep, but I’m ready to go._

_Very well. I will see you soon._

_Be safe, both of you._

_Always._

*

The compound isn’t quite finished yet. There’s some work to be finished in the outer wings, especially the hangar across the lawn, but the main bulk of it has finished; Happy oversaw the installation and transfer of Tony and Loki’s equipment into the brand-new underground workshop just three weeks ago. The entire place is fitted for dragons, with high rafters and climbable walls, air-ducts and wall-tunnels for nests and hiding places for the little ones. June, even with her massive wings, can fit comfortably in the massive dayroom that opens up its entire wall to the lawn.

June lands, and Váli flutters down from her antlers, chirping and delighted. June huffs and companionably nips at her tail, making Váli cheep and dart away, feathers puffed. June laughs, a deep chortle in her throat, as Tony and Loki descend from the saddle.

Loki shuffles his satchel from his back to his front, hands spanning the bulging leather. Within, the Reality and pearlescent egg sit in a warming spell, ready for transfer into the already warmed mineral water incubator in their workshop.

“Go on, explore, Váli,” Tony laughs. “This is our home now. And don’t leave the grounds without June! I know you can fly on your own but that doesn’t mean you can _be_ alone!”

Váli rubs against his body like a cat, now nearly the size of a Great Dane. She’s growing much slower than June ever did, but it’s steady progress, so they’re not too concerned about her small stature. She darts away after he smooths her ruffled feathers between her wood-grain horns.

“I’ll put these two in their bath,” Loki says.

“I’ll go with,” Tony says. He turns to June and rubs obligingly at the underside of her massive jaw as he says, _you’ll be alright out here?_

 _Yes, Tony,_ she replies. _I will look around the edges of the wood. Perhaps take a flight, if Váli is entertained here._

Tony smiles and jogs after Loki, who’s using a touch of magic to move a handful of the building supplies that’s congesting the hallway. The workshop, as they take the elevator down, is fully furnished with Loki’s forge and Tony’s tools and worktables; it’s a wonderful connection of human technology and Asgardian magic, a physical manifestation of the archive-forest space that is the edge of their shared centers.

And in the center stands the mineral incubator, water churning steadily like an aquarium. Tony opens the top of the tank and Loki gently lowers both eggs into it, adjusting the infusion of minerals and tektites until both float, suspended, in the water. He steps back as they settle, and the tank is sealed.

Tony stops and watches. The red and pearly eggs rotate, suspended, floating: they are the future of dragonkind, warm and safe. Ready to hatch, someday, to the warmth of gentle hands and the rasping tongues of older siblings.

Loki takes his hand, and they watch over the future.

*

They settle into the compound with surprising ease.

June takes to the larger space and open skies with joy. She’s delighted to be over so many trees and have the capability to fly up into the sky without the fear of disrupting helicopters or startling enough civilians to have them call in complaints to Stark Industries.

Váli, too, takes the change in stride. She immediately establishes a nest in the rafters and then two more in the air ducts, so about a dozen of their blankets go missing within the first week of the move.

She doesn’t speak, though.

Váli’s verbal progression is worrying. With the move finished and the eggs under JARVIS’ constant supervision, they tackle Váli’s development with all of their attention. June sits in meditation for hours at a time, flicking through Shi’s memories, searching for answers. Loki pores over his ancient tomes and the new ones he’s been writing, painstakingly weaving spells of protection and true-sight into each inked letter to protect the information of the dragons. Tony searches for modern answers, trying to speak with Váli constantly, pausing for her response, urging her to speak. Even though he does not have a direct mental link with her, his connection with Loki is strong enough that he can feel her mind when he clasps tight enough with him.

Nothing seems to work. Loki cannot find answers, and June pulls away from them day after day, barely responding to questions, barely bothering to eat.

Váli, in the meantime, continues about her life, unconcerned. Her neutrality-near-disinterest in their pursuit of helping her makes Tony question how severe this mutism is—is this a characteristic of the Protector of the Soul, or of specific rebirths? Does Váli simply not understand the concept of language beyond that instinct of choosing her own name? Is it selective or conscious mutism, in that Váli has taken on as some kind of…oath of silence?

Loki is unsure of all these options, as they discuss them late into the night. His feelings regarding the emotional packets Váli sends him has convinced him it’s something instinctual—that the emotional transference is an attempt at language that goes beyond a decision to not speak, that it’s something deeper: an inability. They have long, quiet discussions as to if this is even something that is harming Váli, and by their insistence for her to speak, if they are harming her more than helping.

It’s hard. Tony often finds himself more confused after these conversations than he was heading into them.

But they keep moving forward and enter the next conversation with as much determination as the last.

*

_Baby girl,want to go take a trip to the city?_

_No, Tony._

_I think the flight would do us both some good…_

_I need to think. Thank you for thinking of me, but I will stay._

_I’m worried about you. Don’t…overwork yourself, looking through Shi’s memories…_

_It is my duty._

*

Agent Coulson and Steve Rogers bring them a bottle of wine and has about forty pounds of elk bones shipped to the compound as a house-warming gift. Loki takes the wine (Steve’s contribution) and examines it as Tony shakes Agent’s hand; Tony doesn’t even bother to hide his smirk as Váli circles around Coulson and licks, thoughtfully, at the crown of his head. Steve watches this with a kind of brow-raising interest.

“Can’t imagine you two’d be allowed to come all the way out to see us just to settle us in,” Tony says, laughing in his mind as Loki sends him a vague kind of interest in the type of wine Steve brought them— _really_ cheap, but a lot of stuff is compared to Tony’s favorites. At least Loki is interested in it.

Agent Coulson smiles with that bland smile of his that gives nothing away. “We like to keep up with friends,” he says.

“Are we friends?” Loki asks, faux-distractedly.

“I like to think so, Mr. Odinson.”

Loki lets the name slide without comment. “Captain, ever so wonderful to see you again. Save any infants stuck in trees on the way here?”

Steve blinks at Loki, obviously lost for words, before he realizes that Loki is pulling his chain. Loki’s been in modern Earthen culture just as long as Steve has, but it’s not rare to see the differential between how much Loki’s absorbed and how much Steve has when the two are in the same room. “Ah.” A pause. Then, with humor: “It’s my day off.”

Loki hums noncommittally and folds the bottle away into his personal pocket dimension. He likes wine and occasionally allows himself the pleasure because it’s the kind of alcohol that’s least likely to trigger cravings in Tony’s long-standing addiction. Tony’s been good at avoiding the bottle ever since June came around—he’s on and off with being clean, but he’s not… _lost_ anymore.

“And what is your reason for the house call?” Loki asks, once more directing his attention to Steve.

“I wanted to, well, stop by and congratulate you on the move,” Steve says, a little awkwardly. “I know you two want to…hatch the others, so I thought you’d be sticking around for a while. Long enough to call this place home.”

Tony smiles. “Thoughtful as always. Thanks, Steve.”

Steve smiles back, relieved to have been let off Loki’s high, imperious hook. “You’re welcome. It looks nice here.”

“It suits us,” Tony agrees. He waves them out of the entrance hall and towards the dayroom, where they can see June laying on the lawn, her scales recently shed and gleaming in the patch of warm sunlight that’s drifted onto her. Váli steps around them and climbs nimbly up into the rafters high above them, circling the support columns and prancing across the high beams to reach her nest in the east corner. As they appear, June’s great eye opens and surveys them all.

As expected, her mind sours as she sees Steve. They all watch as she turns on her back legs and deliberately puts her rump to them, tail flicking.

 _You’re being childish,_ Tony laughs.

 _He is a deceiver,_ she replies. She doesn’t sound as petulant as usual when they discuss Steve. There’s something sharper and meaner in the undertones of her voice.

_What's he deceiving us about, then, baby girl?_

She glowers and flicks at his mind. It’s not a dissimilar sensation as to when her tail-end catches him on the thighs: a sharp snap, a reprimand.

Steve is shrugging under Coulson’s eye. The Agent’s obviously picked up the tension in the room, and June’s never acted this way towards him, so he’s wisely found the only other culprit in the room. “We’ve never really gotten along.”

Tony shrugs, willing to dismiss the tension in favor of finding out why the two of them are really here. “She doesn’t get along with most people, don’t worry about it. Come on, sit. I’m sure _one_ of you has something more than small talk to chat about.”

Entirely expectedly, it’s Coulson. He takes the hint.

“We’ve been looking into the HYDRA infiltration of SHIELD you pointed out to us,” he says. “It’s a little worse than we expected.”

“Found a cockroach in the kitchen, tore up the wall and found a nest, huh?”

“Something like that. We were hoping to have you take a look, see what you can find from the outside.”

June’s mind darkens considerably as Coulson continues to speak. Tony and Loki both have to gently shield her rolling emotions just to avoid falling into a similar black mood themselves.

 _You know how I feel about us becoming involved in the politics of these people,_ Loki says to Tony, their minds clasped tight. _They mishandled the Realm Nest, June’s egg, that of her nest-mate—and not to mention me, when I came to this place in tatters._

 _I know,_ Tony agrees. _They’re not a bad ally to have, though._

 _They were not helpful when Thanos came,_ Loki replies. _And they only come to us when they want information about the dragons, or when we can help them. Their work may be useful in other areas, but never once to us._

 _My Aunt Peggy started SHIELD,_ Tony explains, after sending a mix of agreement-solidarity. _And Fury really helped me out, when my arc reactor went to shit. They made a few missteps with me and June, but I know they’ve done good things._

Loki sends him the equivalent of a mental shrug. _It is, of course, your choice. It is you who can help them, not I. If you would like to, I offer no objections._

The conversation takes the span of a handful of heartbeats, barely breaking the flow of the conversation. Tony sighs as Loki gently pulls away, and he leans back in his seat, throwing one ankle up onto his knee.

“Look, Agent,” Tony starts. He gestures around the compound. “As much as I would love to be your exterminator, I’ve got other things to worry about right now. I’ve been monitoring chatter about poachers that want a swing at Váli and June, and tightening security even though this one—“ this emphasis said with a thumb gesture towards Váli, who has made herself comfortable in her tall nest above them—"is starting to make nests in the east woods _despite_ us explicitly telling her to stop, and no offense, I don’t like working on lost causes.”

Steve startles a bit. “Lost cause? You think…?”

Tony shrugs. “In the quick look I took the last time, I saw evidence of some deep fucking infiltration. My advice would to be to blow the whole thing up, tear it all down.” A smile. “Gas out the pests, you know what I’m saying? I mean, I _could_ weed out your traitors, but you and I both know it’ll be a really, _really_ long list.”

Coulson leans forward, but Loki waves his hand and speaks before Coulson can open his mouth. After a quick check-in with Tony ( _I do not want them here; neither do I, babe, I don’t want to help; I’ll get rid of them)_ , Loki says, “We are much too busy, in any case. Perhaps find it in you to aid us with a favor before requesting something so tedious as a mole-hunt.”

“We have helped Mr. Stark in the past,” Coulson says, and Loki’s mind sparks with amusement at the prediction they made. “We’ve been helping him along since the very first Iron Man incident.”

“Anthony paid that debt back in full, when he halted the Chitauri invasion, and also when he stopped Thanos from crumpling the Universe in the palm of his hand,” Loki replies, sharply. He stands. “Favors are not bought. Thank you for the gifts. I will see you out, Agent, Captain.”

Tony shrugs as both Coulson and Steve turn their gazes to him in a way that conveys, _he’s the boss._ Tony stays behind as Loki does escort them to the door and reestablishes the baseline of his alarm wards he set up at the entrances and perimeter of the compound.

“Got a little sharp there, didn’t you, babe?” Tony asks, amused, as Loki returns.

“Annoying creatures,” he sniffs. “Favors for favors, help to be bought at the easiest opportunity. Bah. I am much happier to have all of us away from their politics.”

Tony laughs and takes up Loki in his arms, swinging his body side to side until Loki’s body lets loose its tension and swings with him, a smile making its way onto his severe lips. “And which one of us was a prince?”

“I was a _very_ good prince,” Loki replies, faux-indignantly. “If it were not for…”

“Ah, shit, sorry,” Tony says, wincing as Loki’s mind turns towards Thor, the natural next thought: _if it were not for Thor, I would have been King, I would have been the best, I would have…_ however it was meant to end, it always starts with _Thor_. “I didn’t mean to remind you.”

“It is alright,” Loki says. He kisses Tony’s forehead as emphasis. “Although it has been a year and however many months since Thanos, I still hold out hope that he is alive somewhere, that oaf. If anyone could have survived the refugee ship massacre, it would be him. The Valkyrie that escaped the massacre did express some…hope, in his survival…”

“The big lug,” Tony agrees, settling his arms around Loki’s thin waist, still swinging side to side, an impromptu slow-dance without music, without dimmed lights. Loki, in return, adjusts his arms around Tony’s shoulders, crossing his wrists as his arms extend behind Tony’s head. “Did I ever tell you about the time he tried to convince June and I to party with the entire Asgardian elite for seven straight days?”

Loki chuckles, smiling through the subtle grief that’s caught on the breeze in his mind. “The festival of the returning dragons, yes,” he says. “June could not have been older than, what, a year and a half, two years at the time?”

“Two,” Tony laughs. “He just saw a big dragon, thought she was fully grown. Damn, I haven’t thought about that in a long time…”

“Hmm? When June was so little?”

“Yeah, that and the time before you were around with us. Looking back—man, I don’t even know how June and I did it.”

Loki smiles, a benevolent and kind thing, an expression Tony only ever sees in privacy, or when Loki doesn’t know Tony’s looking. “You raised her well,” he says, soft. “You did magnificently.”

Tony pulls Loki closer, pressing their bodies together, fitting lock-and-key; they are so familiar with one another it feels like coming home, settling into an equilibrium in their bodies that they always share in their minds. “Mm,” he hums. “You and I did most of the heavy lifting, though. The both of us. You know that, right? We’d be—we’d be…lesser, without you. More darkness.”

Loki lets his cheek drop on Tony’s head, a gentle pressure. “And I would be much the same without you, and without June, and without Váli,” he says.

“Good thing we’re here. Thank god we have each other.”

Loki smiles against Tony’s hair, and Tony against Loki’s collar bone. They sway together for a while longer, in the quiet of the dayroom, under the light of a settling-afternoon sun, and in the warmth of a building that’s just starting to feel like a home.

*

 _Bonded,_ June says. _Come to me._

Tony stretches as he unbends his body from its hunched position over his worktable. Pepper had sent him an interesting little gadget some SI engineers made that keeps futzing out without warning and troubleshooting the damn thing has taken up the better part of his morning. He’s glad to leave it behind as he takes the elevator up from the workshop and towards the dayroom, where he can feel June resting beneath the great glass wall, tucked out of the rain.

Loki is there when Tony arrives, and once Tony approaches, June lowers her head and swings it around, laying it down on the ground to lower her eyes to their level. Even with her jaw to the ground, her head stands taller than Tony.

 _What’s up, baby girl?_ He rubs at her snout, slow circular passes, feeling her mind open slowly to them; she’s heavy with melancholy and something deeper that he can’t quite feel, like it’s obscured by a heavy, draping blanket. Her meditation and moroseness over the past week or so has been…worrying him.

 _I have…finished my inventory of Shi’s memories, regarding mute hatchlings in his time,_ she says. She’s uncharacteristically quiet and dim, her voice barely echoing. _I…_

 _There is no indication of how we can help Váli?_ Loki asks, after June trails off, eyes sliding off the two of them. He’s stabbing in the dark as to why June is…like this. _Or is it is something else?_

_There is not no indication, but no clear answers, either. I have touched Váli’s mind, and I have…realized that it is not her choice to remain voiceless. She does not have the capability to filter her thoughts and emotions through a lens of language. She knew her name and how to say it but can do no more than that._

_Shit,_ Tony says. _You’re sure? There’s…is there anything we can do about it?_ He vaguely recalls something about sensitive periods in development, when skills are either learned or not, and there’s no coming back from it. Has Váli passed hers?

_I am sure. I…the cause of her delay is…that has been the question I have tried to answer over the last days. Shi has some memories of mute dragons in his time, but the reasons were diluted with age, barely remembered. As far as I have been able to see, these dragons were…born in a time of few found riders, or whose riders died shortly after their hatching._

June pauses, her inner eyelids sliding shut. Tony’s heart starts to race.

_These dragons were bonded to other riders, with other bonds. Their mutism is because their minds were…smothered…in infancy. The bonds of the other dragon suffocated the younger dragon and halted their ability to develop normally. Most lost their voices—some lost much more._

_June…_

_I do not think Váli’s lack of language is because of the two of you, or your actions_ , she says, not giving Loki the time to gather his thoughts and continue. _I believe it is because of me. My presence in Loki’s mind smothered Váli as readily as a pillow to an infant. I…I did this to her._

 _June,_ Tony whispers. _June, we…not for certain, we…_

_I have considered this for some time. It is what makes sense to the evidence from Shi’s memories and to what has transpired with Váli’s progress. My mind is heavy, now—and my bond to Loki is foundational in his mind. Váli could not have hoped to create a bond that could have withstood the weight of me, every second of every day._

They fall silent, words failing them. Tony tries to wrap his mind around it, tries to imagine that Váli was…was hurt because of what they’ve done. That they hatched her and didn’t bother to think about the implications of hatching a dragon to a rider with a bond.

 _I…_ Loki hesitates. He pulls from the brewing, roiling mess of their shared-space and tries to bridge their mutual mourning and horror with words. _We did not ever think this would be an issue. We had no reason to. The Realm Eternal gifted us the capability to hatch many eggs to us, so dragonkind does not become extinct once more. Why should they allow us and not warn you, June?_

 _They did not have to,_ she replies, heavy and low. _Shi did. He merely did not remember as clearly. The hatchlings and their growth were not his concern: they were Dušan’s, the Protector of Soul’s._

 _Shit,_ Tony whispers. _Shit._

 _This was us,_ Loki whispers.

_No. it was me. It was my mind that—_

_No,_ June, Loki interrupts. _It may have been your presence, but it was my mind in which Váli was suffocated, under the supervision of us all. It is because of us. The blame is not entirely yours._

 _It’s ours,_ Tony agrees. _We did this to her. We—we…_

This horrible, familiar sensation of black bile rising up his throat nearly chokes Tony, shoving the air out of his lungs, filling the back of his mouth with the taste of tar and blood. Guilt, heavy and thick and bloody, tears itself free from the shackles Tony cuffed them in ever since he gave June her wings back and forgave himself for being so careless with her. Now it’s back, clogging him up, stoppering his breath, plugging up his eyes and his ears until all he can think is we did this we did this we did this we

 _Anthony,_ Loki whispers.

 _Tony,_ June whispers.

Together, they reach for him, and pull his mind away from the guilt and its tar-suffocation. They clear out his throat and push new air into his lungs. They hold his mind as he weeps there, shivering behind the walls of his archive, lamenting over the memories of baby peach, of Váli, of her voice when she said her name, when she was small enough to carry, when she was so like June he could almost see her eyes shine blue when she turned her head just right.

They let him. After time passes, Tony remerges, put-together, shivery, but breathing, and ankle-deep in guilt he thought he had conquered but had only imprisoned for a short while.

 _Okay,_ Tony says, allowing both June and Loki to reach for him, and he reaches back, clasping them tight. _What do we do about it?_

*

Tony wakes up, sudden. He blinks the sleep out of his eyes and lifts his head, categorizing what’s happening with his body; he’s on his back, face turned towards Loki, arm outstretched to him. He shifts his legs and finds them pinned with a heavy, comforting weight.

He looks down. Váli is laid across his and Loki’s legs, eyes open, watching him. Her feathered wings ruffle as she shifts slightly, tail curling up and following the line of Loki’s back.

 _Váli,_ he whispers. He can feel her through Loki’s mind. _Váli, honey. Please, can you…are you okay? You’re not hurting?_

Váli’s opal eyes blink once, then twice. Her mind touches his, a slide of cool sheets, the humming song of an arc reactor, drops of water falling within a crystalline cave. He feels the background melody of contentment, a hum of rest, a soft refrain of love. There is nothing in her that speaks words, but nothing, too, that hurts.

 _Oh, Váli,_ he whispers. Váli’s head tilts, jaw on her forelegs, feathered crest perking up at her name. _Oh, honey. I love you. I’m so sorry._

Váli’s mind laps against his, oceanic tides rolling against the shore of him. She is gentle and quiet and as Tony watches her, she closes her eyes and lays with him, not quite asleep, not quite awake.

Tony doesn’t fall back asleep.

*

Loki digs two of his fingers into the corner of his eyes, grimacing, working out the tension and burn that’s settled thee. As he opens his eyes again, he sees Anthony rubbing circles at his temples from where he’s seated across the dayroom table, breathing deep.

It’s nighttime, swells of moonlight falling over the waving grass, filtering through the glass wall. Loki barely registered the change—they started this horrific discussion after their shared dinner.

They had to step out of their shared space only an hour into this whole thing, incapable of dealing with their own emotions plus those of the other two. June’s mind has become swollen with blame and purpose, an uneasy combination; Anthony’s is thick with that brackish guilt that threatens to overwhelm them all; and Loki knows he is not whole, either, his own mind sharp and broken in places, cutting anything that comes near when it turns.

“There has to be another way,” Anthony mutters. He opens his eyes and tiredly leans back, running his hand now across his mouth and facial hair. “Cutting June off from you isn’t a long-term solution.”

“And what is one, then?” Loki asks, trying not to sound bitter. “Anthony, please, enlighten me if you have thought up another way to save Váli from any further harm.”

Anthony bristles. Before he can respond, June says, _it can be a long-term solution. I began to speak when I was…four months? Then we know I must be separate until then, at the minimum. That is not too long._

“At the minimum,” Anthony repeats, the emphasis bitter. “You’re still an infant, June, and you’re six years old. I bet a whole lot of important things are still developing in you, things you need. There’s no way we can be apart from you that long to support the others as they grow!”

June turns her great head towards Anthony, blue eyes chilling and piercing. _We must, she says. We must do it for them. That is our duty._

An image comes to them, from June’s mind: Váli, her eyes opening for the first time; foreign, faded memories of squalling little hatchlings of all shapes and species, learning to fly, learning to speak, learning to wield their inborn magic. Turning their small heads upwards, cooing and chirping and smiling with their tiny little jaws, scales glimmering, eyes bright.

Tony puts his head in his hands, teeth clenching.

“We need only separate ourselves until their riders are found,” Loki says, subdued. “Should we find Váli’s rider, or the reality’s, or pearl’s, then we have no concern.”

“That’s trying to find, what, six people max out of the entire Universe?” Tony says into his hands. “The odds are against us. There’s no way we can…”

 _It has been done before, and will be done again,_ June says. _This is the way._

“It is not your sacrifice right now, Anthony,” Loki murmurs. “It is…mine. Váli has bonded with me, and so June and I will…separate, for now, until she has grown, or found her rider.”

“You…” Anthony lets out a sharp breath. “It’s not fair. You’re—why…?”

“No, it’s not fair,” Loki concedes. “But it is my choice. I would rather suffer than her.”

June closes her eyes. _We will be alright,_ she says. _We have time, and options. But for now, to stop further harm to Váli, I will distance myself from Loki. And should it come that another hatches before we are ready, Tony…_

“You’ll leave me, too,” he says. He has not lifted his head. “Figured that part out.”

“Anthony…”

“I know, it’s for them,” Anthony says. “I know. We don’t really have a choice, I get that. Of course we have to help them before we help ourselves. Just—haven’t we done enough?”

Loki’s mind turns, unwillingly, to Titan, to that planet of decay, with a hatchling’s grown body falling through the sky, the taste of dragon’s blood in the air, to Thanos’ cold fist closing around his throat. He shakes away the sensation but cannot stop himself from touching his throat with a grimace.

“It is never enough,” Loki whispers. He turns his eyes to the sky outside, now more familiar and comforting than the bright nebulae-filled night sky of Asgard, or the violet-red horizon of Alfheim. Earth’s dark, spotted sky is one that brings him peace, for it is the sky under which his beloved sleep, the one whose bright, swollen moon has watched over him in his own rest.

Anthony looks up at Loki, searching his expression. He then turns, too, and gazes outside, through the panes of glass towards the dark forest and even darker sky. Silence hangs about them like a veil before June speaks.

_Our sacrifices will not be forgotten or thankless. The time we will spend apart is time we give to ones who cannot survive without us. And it is not forever._

Loki takes a deep breath and lets it out very slowly. “It is not forever,” he repeats.

*

Loki presses his hands to the golden spot between June’s eyes, where the Mind Stone once sat.

Bonded, June says. _I love you. I will miss you very dearly while we are apart._

 _And I you,_ Loki replies.

 _You are not lesser,_ June murmurs, as her mind reaches for their shared bond, that familiar and ancient thing strung between them. The sensation of her reaching for him, of her mind sliding into his, is one that is so familiar Loki can’t help but feel tears well up in his eyes and he does not know why. _You will never be secondary. Thank you for this sacrifice. I will carry it with me forever, into the rest of my lives._

*

When Loki wakes, it is still dark. The ceiling above him seems very far away, but also far too close; the shades of grey that comprise it buzz and move in odd, atomic patterns, as though the meager light does not quite know how to settle against the back of his eyes. He closes his eyes to blink away the subtle movements, swallowing the heavy spit that’s collected in his mouth.

There’s a distant, migraine pain in the front of his skull, radiating from the bridge of his nose along the lines of his eye sockets, drilling deeper as the pain rounds to the corner of his eyes. There’s a kind of heat, too, settling around his scalp, like his hair is too tight and pulling his skin too taut. It’s nothing like magical exhaustion, the kind that makes his muscles melt and his breath come quick; this is a deadening, a sinking into something heavy and lax.

Loki opens his eyes again, slowly moving his head to the right, where most of the pain has congregated; placing some pressure against the spot with the pillow makes the pain dissipate slightly. An orb of dimmed magelight hovers on the far side of the room, a distant firefly.

A face appears in the darkness, which has lightened slightly with shielded, curtained light from the left side of the room. Loki looks at it for a moment, and then realizes it’s Anthony.

“Hey, honey,” Anthony whispers. He’s sitting in a chair next to Loki’s bedside—their bedside, he realizes, recognizing the darkened room for their own. Anthony reaches out and smooths hair away from Loki’s forehead, the palm of his hand ice against his skin. “How’re you feeling?”

Loki swallows, pressing up into Anthony’s cool hand. “…headache,” he settles on, the word stumbling out of his mouth.

“Yeah, I bet,” Anthony agrees, voice still pitched low. “Want some water?”

Loki nods. Anthony helps him carefully crane his head up so he can sip from a straw, the water blessedly cool, sweeping away the cobwebs and stickiness in his throat. He lays back down and Anthony fusses with his blankets, murmuring something that Loki doesn’t quite catch. He realizes he’s closed his eyes; when he opens them, the room is a little clearer.

Loki looks at Anthony. There’re creases in his skin, along his arms and his cheeks, like he fell asleep on tough corners on the blankets, cheek pressed down. His hair is a mess, oily and mussed, combed out of his eyes without effort. Loki realizes he can’t feel Anthony’s mind, with that realization comes a single moment of silence and suspension, his mind barely able to comprehend what that means.

A second later he panics. He snaps his hand out, uncoordinated, desperately reaching for Anthony’s arm; he misses and strikes his forearm against the end table, swiping the glass of water against the wall. Anthony startles and grabs his hand, standing up, immediately reaching for Loki’s cheek, his touch calming and startling all at once.

“Anthony—can’t—the pain, my shields—your mind—”

“Shh, Loki,” Anthony says, voice calm, eyes wild. “Shh, stop struggling, you’re okay, June pushed your shields up really high so you can heal, babe, you’re okay, I’m still here.”

Loki struggles to breathe deep enough to clear the dizziness that’s overtaken him, struggles to center himself in this new fluttering panic. He turns inward, searching desperately though his mind and his center, scouring his shields for the place where they’ve been erected before Anthony’s anchor in his mind. He finds it, finds the glass walls of his shields high and planted around it; he presses at them, and through the reflective, mirror shields, he can feel the warmth and fear of Anthony’s mind, present, muted.

His body falls limp, and Anthony gently eases him down, folding his arm against his body. “See? You’re okay. It’s just confusing.”

Loki whispers, “June?” He looks out their window but does not see the eye of his bonded, or a gleam of her glimmering scales.

Anthony winces. “She said, uh, that she should give you some space while you’re recovering.”

That’s when Loki remembers. He moves his mind towards the place where June bound herself to him, all that time ago; when she reached into his center, and swept away the evil lingering things, and where she dug herself a space that she would never leave, a spot that was always empty in his mind. Now, as he sets down there, he finds that corded steel and sunlit place bereft, weakened—barely there, June so far from him he cannot even feel her warmth.

He can only sense that she is alive, somewhere, but nothing more.

Loki’s eyes fill with tears before he can stop himself. He turns his eyes towards Anthony, whose face crumples almost immediately, the brave and nurturing expression cracking away into grief. Anthony leans down and presses his forehead to Loki’s, the pain still there, now its source apparent and mournful and raw to them both.

“It hurts,” Loki whispers.

“I know,” Anthony replies. “I know.”

“It is worse than I thought…it’s…”

Loki closes his eyes, letting his fingers dig into Anthony’s arms. He feels very cold. He adjusts his shields to let his beloved in, just enough so his mind does not rot with loneliness, so he can remind himself he is not alone, and that June is somewhere, even if she is not near him.

Váli’s mind is quiet, held just beyond his shields, protected from the pain and the onslaught. Loki can feel her there: warm, cavernous.

*

It takes Loki four days before he feels strong enough to leave their bed.

He looks sallow and exhausted, with pain lines creasing the skin around his eyes and mouth, but his eyes are contracting normally in light and he can read for an hour or two at a time without triggering another bout of migraine-like symptoms. When he stands, it’s with great effort, but he remains upright even as he leans on Tony’s arm to reach the bathroom and sink into a hot bath.

Despite Tony’s fussing, he gets dressed on his own and insists on spending the morning in the dayroom. Tony helps to lever Loki to his feet, offering his arm for support as Loki regathers his strength and moves forward. They take a couple of rests along the way—including a pitstop sitting on the stairs, which are suddenly far too numerous for Tony’s liking, and he realizes not having an elevator that reaches their living suite is now not so much a safety feature and more an overlooked problem—but they reach the dayroom without Loki falling or spiraling into another storm of colors or pain.

Váli is there, high up in her nest. Her head perks above the rafters as Loki and Tony shuffle in, and she bounds down from her place as Loki slowly sits down in his loveseat with a great release of breath. She trots over with bouncing feet, ears perked, but slows to a tentative crawl at Tony’s warning look.

“Gentle, Váli,” he says. “Loki’s tired.”

Loki smiles at the concerned look he receives in return. “It’s alright, cloudberry,” he says. He opens his lap and smooths his palms down the sides of her head as she gently rests her jaw there.

Tony leaves Loki’s side briefly to brew a cup of unoffensive tea, drumming his fingers anxiously on the counter. He feels Loki’s attention turn towards him, but it slides away before Tony returns with a mug and two pieces of toast.

“Alright?” Tony asks.

“Mmm,” Loki agrees, sipping from the mug. He smiles tiredly at Tony and reaches up to cup the side of his face, drawing him down into a sweet kiss, making Tony lean and bend over Váli’s curled body near their feet. “Thank you, Anthony. You have taken very good care of me.”

Tony lets himself smile sadly and kisses Loki’s cheekbone before he says, “You’ll do the same for me, when it’s my turn.”

Loki slides his hand from Tony’s jaw to the back of his neck, keeping Tony close. “Don’t think of it now,” he suggests, a soft murmur. “The situation may change before another hatches.”

Tony sighs. He pulls away, gently, and covers Loki’s hand with his own, where it has returned to its place on Tony’s cheek. “Yeah, I know. But I’d rather…brace myself, I guess.”

Loki hums before letting his hand slide away so he can cup his mug with both hands, drinking deeply before returning one hand to Váli’s head, smiling down at her. Tony can’t feel the intricacies of what Váli sends to him most of the time, but he and Loki have been tightly connected the past four days to help Loki’s mind heal from the majority disconnection from June. He feels her reaching towards Loki with concern, and love, and an aura of questioning, of rationale.

“Do not worry yourself, Váli,” Loki says to her, meaning it utterly. “This was not your fault, or your doing. I promise you.”

Váli’s concern and sadness fades a little under Loki’s sincere words. Tony himself feels calmed by it, by how despite the pain Loki’s in, despite the loneliness and familiar aching blackness of his past has begun once more to lap at his ankles, he does not believe it anyone’s fault, least of all Váli’s. That he would do it again in an instant, without question.

Tony bends down and kisses Loki’s forehead. Loki accepts it with a smile and settles into his chair, allowing Tony to fuss and drape a blanket over him and turn the fireplace up to a warm blaze. Loki ends up falling asleep with Váli’s head in his lap twenty minutes later, but Tony expected that—at least he’s up and about.

Not long after Loki falls asleep, June descends from her anxious-lazy flight above the nearby woods, out of sight from the glass wall to the lawn. Tony turns towards her as she lands and shuffles her wings, peering into the compound to look at Loki.

Tony leaves Váli with Loki and heads outside and opens his mind to June as he takes up as much of her head into his arms as he can. He’s been splitting his time between June and Loki—whenever Loki fell asleep, he’d move outside to June to be with her, and vice versa. But June has had fewer symptoms than Loki, less pain and fewer dreams, so she’s insisted on Tony spending more time with Loki.

 _How is he?_ June asks, voice ringing with concernworryanxiety.

 _He’s better_ , Tony relays, finding the necessity of relaying Loki’s mental status to a dragon that, five days prior was connected to him by his mind, outrageous and saddening. _Tired still._

 _But better_ , June seeks to confirm.

_Yeah, baby girl._

June releases a very human sigh, a great release of her breath, tinged with rising smoke. _I am glad. I hate that I am apart from him._

_Me too. It doesn’t feel right._

_Unnatural,_ June agrees, turning her gaze once more to Loki’s sleeping form. Her mind turns over several thoughts at once, cogs spinning, marbles dancing. _Is this how it will feel to lose one of you to death? This—emptiness?_

Tony’s heart breaks. _Oh, honey. I…_

 _It aches_ , June explains. _The place where he once was is empty. But he has not come back, like he did on Titan. Sometimes I am alright, but then I think of him, or I linger too long on a flower or a song I know he likes, and the pain returns. It is the tide, ever-returning. Is this what I will face for the rest of my life, when you and he are gone?_

 _Yes,_ Tony says, incapable of lying. He thinks of Edwin Jarvis, a man more his father than servant, of his knotted ties, his restrained but mischievous eyes, the way he used to roll up his sleeves in neat inch long cuffs when he went to work with his hands. He thinks of his mother, her smile, the pearls she was wearing the night she died; he remembers her saddened expression, discontent, worried; he remembers her trying to kiss his cheek and him turning away, fuming, mouth still full of brimstone insults. He thinks of holding June’s torn up little body, lungs working to suck in air when they were filled with blood, her weak voice in the panic-empty cavern of his mind.

 _Yes, June,_ he says. _It will be like that. Somedays it won’t leave you alone. Others—it’ll linger, right in the corner of the room. Sometimes it’ll pass from your mind without you realizing it until you do. But it’ll always hurt, forever—just…predictably. And eventually…you’ll just think of the good, and the pain won’t be so bad. Scars, you know?_

 _Scars_ , June repeats, wings flexing, briefly shading Tony from the midmorning sun. _Before they heal, open wounds that fester. But surviving the hurt—the infection—means they turn into scars that ache._

_Yeah. And the scars don’t hurt every day…_

_But most._

*

Time passes.

Loki has more nightmares. His mind clings to Tony’s tighter than it ever has, like he’s frightened Tony will slip away at any moment, like he’ll turn to ash and fade away while Loki isn’t looking.

June tries to coax Váli into flying away from the compound, to go journeying with her. Váli rarely agrees, never interested in going further than the forests around them. June confides she is concerned Váli is uninterested in finding her rider, the true one that she learned about before they moved here.

Time goes on.

*

A ringtone blaring from the bedside table jerks Tony right out of sleep. He blearily reaches for it, barely registering that it’s three in the morning; beside him, Loki shifts and groans as Tony opens the call and puts the phone to his ear.

He makes an intelligible, questioning sound as he answers, some combination of _Tony Stark_ and _it’s three in the fucking morning, who’s calling me_ and _Pepper if Stark Industries isn’t burning to the ground I swear to God._

“Mr. Stark,” Agent Coulson says. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

“Barely,” Tony mutters. “What is it?” He pulls the phone away from his ear and glares at it, and then asks, “How’d you get this number?”

“Ms. Potts gave it to me,” Coulson replies. “I have some news for Mr. Odinson. Thor just appeared in the south of Norway with about a hundred or so Asgardian refugees.”

Tony bolts upright. Loki yelps, scrabbling upwards as well, clutching the sheets with glowing fingers. He stares at Tony, who stares right back.

“Mr. Stark?”

“Thor’s alive,” Tony says, dumbly.

Loki stares at him.

“How is he?” Tony asks.

“Perfectly fine, as far as I can tell. He’s been asking for a way to contact you since we landed to meet him. I’ll hand it over to him.”

“Oh, shit,” Tony says. “He’s coming to the phone!”

Loki starts. “I—what?”

“You should talk to him,” Tony hisses, pressing the phone to his chest.

“He’s calling you! I—why would he? Now?”

“He’s your brother,” Tony argues, and tosses the phone at Loki before he can respond. Loki juggles it before bringing it up to his own ear, tucked beneath the wild, sleep-styled edges of his dark hair, freshly cut.

“Brother?” Loki asks. He falls silent. Tony can hear Thor’s booming voice from the phone but can’t decipher any specific words; Loki’s mind is whirling too fast for him to catch it in his surface thoughts, either. Tony doesn’t feel the need to dig deeper to hear the conversation in Loki’s newly forming memories, so he watches as Loki listens and breathes, eyes still and face even stiller.

“We will be there shortly,” Loki says, and hangs up. He immediately gets out of their bed, clothes appearing on him in a shimmering gleam of green light; his sleep-mussed hair and spotty cheeks immediately smooth out into a princely presentation. Tony scrabbles out of bed in return and has to throw on some slacks and a jacket to cover his pajamas.

“Uh, so, what’s the word?” Tony asks, hopping to pull on his shoe as Loki sweeps out of the room and down the stairs towards the dayroom. “Loki?”

“He did not tell me much,” Loki says, pausing briefly to let Tony catch up; a shiver of magic passes over him, and when Tony looks down, his clothes have been cleaned and pressed. “He merely said he had collected as many Asgardian survivors from the other refugee ships and has only now returned here. He said something about a rabbit and a tree, but he’s always been…”

“Hey, wait, babe,” Tony says, catching Loki’s wrist, trying to stop him for the briefest of moments. Loki pauses, and then turns back around. His eyes are wide but guarded, and for a second, it’s like looking at the Loki everybody else sees: the calm demeanor, the intelligent eyes, but none of the heart—all the sensitive, soft parts tucked out of sight, beneath tough skin and thick armor.

Loki’s reflective expression melts away after a moment, wax to a candle. Worry-love-concern-annoyance-fondness-irritation flits across their bond, now winking open. Loki obediently steps into Tony’s embrace as he says, “I…I hoped he survived, but I think I…suspected he was dead to Thanos’ hand. To hear his voice again…”

Tony runs his hands up Loki’s back. “I getcha. It’ll be okay.”

“I know it will. I do not know how to feel about it.”

Loki pulls away after a moment, shaking himself. He tugs Tony by their joined hands into the dayroom, where June is waking up from the activity in Tony’s mind; Váli is slowly, lazily, perking up from her place in the rafters.

“Thor is alive,” Loki informs June, his mind aching a bit stronger with the reminder that he has to speak to her out loud. “I…I would like to fly there, if at all possible.”

 _Yes, we shall,_ June says. _No world-walking?_

Tony relays the question to Loki, feeling like a messenger pigeon.

“It is not accurate,” Loki says. “Perfect for realms, but…on the same plane, it is too wild. Your flight will be quicker.”

_No delays, then. Shall Váli stay or come?_

Tony looks up as Váli descends, slowly, from her nest; she spirals down in lazy circles until landing near Loki, who allows her to immediately curl around him in support and comfort.

June nudges Váli with her snout as she says to Tony, _I would prefer not to leave her, if you both are joining me._

“Yeah, I want to come,” Tony says. “Okay, road trip everybody. J, prep the travel saddle.”

*

The flight goes quickly, since they had a tailwind to guide them over the Atlantic. Váli flew on her own for a solid hour and a half before getting tired and maneuvering herself into June’s antlers, clinging to the tines. Loki’s fingers drum anxious beats into Tony’s sides the entire trip.

As they circle around the coordinates Coulson sent them, Tony begins to shiver in earnest; they’re dressed for winter and high-altitude flights, but the chill settles deep in as they descend. Loki’s fingers warm against his side and a wash of a heating spell cascades over him, like the heat from a hearth. He leans back into Loki’s front in thanks as June circles down beneath the clouds and finds a place to land.

The site is a cliffside near the ocean. Dozens of vehicles and helicopters litter the area, along with a rather massive spaceship that looks a little beat up and burned, but otherwise held together. Tents have been pitched in semi-regular circles around central fires, blazing high. June avoids the people milling about and lands in a clear zone, baring her wings high to make herself look larger before the SHIELD agents that stare.

Váli flutters down from June’s antlers, ears perked. She tries to investigate a nearby jeep, but June steps neatly above her and somewhat ahead of her, the bulk of her foreleg making Váli pause, protected, beneath June’s underbelly. Váli’s ears fall back briefly as she examines the underside of June’s jaw before acquiescing and staying nearby.

Loki slides down June’s back first, followed by Tony. As they stretch briefly from the long flight, Coulson approaches them, waiting until June stares him down and looks away dismissively before coming closer.

“Good to see you, Mr. Stark, Loki,” Coulson says, shaking Tony’s hand and not even bothering to offer it to Loki; he knows Loki wouldn’t accept. “Thor’s near the ship, last time I saw him.”

Tony nods and grins a bit as Loki immediately sets off, bringing his hand down on Váli’s side as she scampers up next to him, after June had lifted her foot in silent permission to follow. “Thanks, buddy. Must be a slow day if they sent you all the way out here.”

“I’m in the alien visitors department,” Coulson says, dryly. “I go where they go.”

Tony looks at him. “I seriously can’t tell if you’re joking right now.”

Coulson smiles.

Tony shakes it off and jogs after Loki, June following by circumventing the tents and milling people by circling the encampment, ignoring the phones or eyes raised in her direction. Her eye remains firmly on Váli, whose curiosity has her sticking her nose into interesting things—near the fire, under a jeep, towards a courageous outstretched hand—but she never veers away from Loki’s side.

Tony sees Thor first. He’s got a haircut, which looks good on him, Tony supposes. He’s wearing a toned-down and torn-up version of the armor and cape he was wearing when they first met, and altogether looks more…adult than before. Older, even though Tony knows Asgardians don’t age the same way. Tony taps Loki’s arm and gestures towards him when Loki turns his eyes.

Loki stills. When he unfreezes, he briskly walks up to Thor, who’s in conversation with the Valkyrie that visited Loki last year and relayed the news about the refugee ship massacre. Thor turns and sees Loki approaching, and grins wide enough to light up the sun; that lovely, bright expression is promptly punched right off his face when Loki decks him hard enough to resound across the camp.

Tony winces, and even Váli’s ears lay back, surprised. June snorts with amusement in Tony’s mind as Loki immediately throws himself at Thor, arms wide, and embraces his brother tight.

*

Thor says, “We were lucky to find as many of us as we did. The Mad Titan destroyed the ship after speaking to you, brother…some survived. We’ve been moving about the Universe for the past while, but without lightspeed travel—the ship we secured was…pretty shit—it was slow going getting back here.”

Loki adjusts his grip around the cup he’s been given—something warm and heady. Tony has graciously declined to drink his, fearing an alcohol that’s geared towards Asgardian physiology and not human.

“No…rainbow bridge?” Tony asks. “World-walking? We’ve been thinking you were dead, buddy.”

“Sorry,” Thor says, sheepishly. He grins around the soreness on his jaw. “We have too many infirmed—to many injured—for the Bifrost. And Loki is the only of us that is capable of traversing Yggdrasil as he does. Even the best of our mages couldn’t figure out how he did it. Mother always said Loki had somewhere else to go and that he needed some way to get there.”

“Mother?” Loki asks. “Did she…?”

Thor brightens, and a great knot uncoils itself in Tony’s belly at the sight of it. “She did, yes! She is not here—still wandering near Xandar, I think—but alive.”

Loki releases a great breath and murmurs, “Thank the nine.”

Tony looks at Thor again. He’s got two differently colored eyes, now, and a rakish scar around the eyelid of the new one. The way he holds himself is different than the man Tony met on the hellicarrier, all that time ago—someone wiser.

“What’s the plan now, big guy?” Tony asks.

Thor smiles. “Regroup here, and then travel Yggadrasil for another home. I am hoping to locate another realm to plant Asgard’s roots in again. If not…well, we hope to find home here.”

Loki laughs. “I am sure the humans will be very pleased to have us here in droves.”

*

They return home with high spirits.

Loki seems more buoyant, without the weight on his shoulders that he’s carried for years. Váli seems invigorated by the trip, and has taken to flying more often, darting around June when she lays under the sun like a buzzing fly, or an interested hummingbird. Tony starts receiving dozens of texts a day from Thor, who insists upon chatting about anything that comes to his mind, and he sends a lot of rather artsy pictures, once he gets a hang of the camera.

He regrets giving Thor the Starkphone at first, but eventually comes to enjoy the relentless photos random Asgardians, wildflowers, the ocean, the sky, and occasionally Thor’s own face in well-framed selfies.

Loki looks at all the photos and shakes his head, but his mind is warm with fondness.

Time passes again.

*

June turns seven. Not long after, Váli turns two. They throw a party which involves giving both of them a proportional amount of preferred prey animals to hunt across the lawn or in the sky.

Not long after, Thor comes around.

He used the Bifrost (which is now powered by his axe? Tony barely understood how it worked in the first place when Loki tried to explain it to him earlier, but he’s not an astrophysicist, so sue him) to come to the compound, which brands an ugly symbol in the lawn right after it had been manicured.

Tony sighs at the sight of it, even as he gets crushed in a hug. He pats Thor back kindly, grimacing as he’s released and a handful of spots on him light up with achy pain. He’s not getting any younger.

“Brother!” Thor beams, taking Loki up in his arms. Loki bears it with ill grace but lets it by without comment.

“I would like your help, Loki,” Thor says. “I want to scour for a new home planet. Could you walk me across the branches of Yggdrasil?”

Loki glances at Tony. _Would you prefer I stay?_

 _We’ll be alright here,_ Tony says, smiling back. _Don’t stay away long._

“Very well, brother,” Loki replies. “Let me gather some of my things, and I’ll take you across the branches. I can’t be gone for long.”

Thor beams. “Thank you!”

*

Loki leaves as the afternoon sun crests up in the peak of the sky. Tony descends to the lab, leaving Váli to fly up to her nest and June to roam alone in the sky, and tries to get some work done in the quiet Loki’s absence affords him.

It’s weird, now, working without someone in his space. He remembers a time when he used to always work alone—with JARVIS, his music, and his tools. But now there’s always someone around, either Loki with his spells or his magic-wielded forging hammer, or Váli with her inquisitive nose and wide lovely eyes, or even June, when she was littler, peeking around his space or now, her mind clasped in his, listening to his thoughts, feeling what he does. Being alone, with June’s attention elsewhere, beyond the sand-lines of his mind, he finds himself at odds, unable to think without the hum of life.

JARVIS plays music at his behest, but it’s still not the same. It takes him twice as long to fall into a rhythm than it ever has, and even then, he hesitates, never quite letting go entirely.

He moves onto hands-on work rather than blueprinting and makes some upgrades to June’s battle saddle. Her growth has slowed enough that he only has to adjust the breast-width, and after he does that, he tries to integrate the connection between the saddle and the nanite wings to ease the strain and help June adjust to the difference in weight easier than she can now.

She hasn’t worn this saddle in two years. Tony hopes she never will have to again.

With the distraction of his hopes and the music, he almost doesn’t hear a muted thunk from behind him. He pauses, thinking, and lowers the blasting music to silence. “J?”

“Sir, I believe it was…”

He pauses, which is so unlike JARVIS that Tony turns around, half expecting to see something unthinkable, like Fury in a bathrobe, or Thanos in full battle-armor. But what he sees instead is the back of his workshop, untouched, nothing out of place.

_Thunk._

Tony instinctively turns towards the noise. As he does, he sees a rippling wave in the water of the incubator, the displacement shifting some of the mineralized water up to the lid of the tank. Within it, the reality egg, red and ruby and deep wine red, twitches; it smacks against the glass again, creating that thudding noise.

“I am reading a spike in internal movement and telepathic reaching, Sir,” JARVIS reports. “It is similar to the spikes we noted in Váli’s mental outputs in the days before she hatched.”

Hatched!

“They’re hatching?” Tony gapes, standing and quickly moving to the tank; he reaches inside and scoops the egg out, shaking the warm water off his skin as he pulls it out and holds it in his hands. He puts the shell against his chest and waits, and sure enough, he feels the vibrations from a writhing creature inside butting against the shell.

And then he hears a squall, annoyed and loud. It echoes within the egg and Tony can hear it without straining, now that it’s not muffled by the water.

“Holy shit,” Tony says. His whole body feels numb. _“Holy shit.”_

*

June lays her head down on the dayroom floor so she can examine the egg at close distance without being close enough to risk nudging it accidentally. The egg is smaller than most of her scales.

 _They are very loud, in there,_ June notes as the hatchling inside squalls loudly and scrapes against the inside of their shell. _Much more so than Váli. She took days to hatch, yes?_

_We saw some telepathic reaching in her a week or so off from when she hatched, yeah. But she wasn’t like this until the last few hours._

_Perhaps this one is ready to be here._

_They only just started to reach. Why would they already be hatching? Loki’s not even here, they better not think about it until he’s back._

_June chortles. Tell that to the little one. They’ve already cracked._

“What!” Tony steps around the impromptu nest they’ve made for the reality egg, and lays eyes on a two-inch crack along the side facing June, the internal membrane of the shell fractured and sluggishly bleeding around the sharp edges of the crack. “Woah, they mean business.”

_Indeed. There’s no way to slow them down now. I do hope Loki returns quickly enough to witness it._

_Me too…_ Tony pauses, hesitating. _I just hope he’s back. If he’s not, I’m afraid he’ll start thinking he’s, you know…_

_Secondary?_

_Yeah. I know we’re connected, but sometimes you can help but feel shitty like that. And missing a hatching…_

_I fear the same. I told him so before he parted, but…as you say. It is hard to shake sometimes._

Tony shakes his head and sighs. He lays his hand down on the shell and thinks, _please, buddy, wait for just a little while longer._

*

Loki’s bond blossoms open around two hours after the reality egg begins to hatch, when there are spiraling cracks along every side of the egg and Tony has begun to glimpse sliding wet scales within. The tension between them dissipates like the sun peeking out from a cloud, warm and familiar and perfect, and Tony reaches for him right away.

_Loki! The reality egg is hatching, get in here quick!_

_What?_ Loki’s mind, interested and distracted by his time with Thor, snaps to him; he shuffles through Tony’s memories in a split second. _They weren’t ready this afternoon!_

_They’re close, they’ve been hatching so fast, we were so afraid that you were going to miss it!_

There’s the roar and brightness of the Bifrost, and then Loki appears round June’s back, darting beneath her raising wings to reach the egg and the nest its resting in. He kneels down, hands hovering over the splitting shell, eyes wide.

“They…what an eager little thing,” Loki says, wondrously.

“June took twelve hours or something to hatch after she was put in my hands,” Tony says, thoughtfully. “I was around her for maybe a week before that, though, so we’re not sure when she really started to reach or wake up.”

“And Váli took several days,” Loki agrees, still watching the egg. June’s mind opens briefly with surprise, a sudden and bright spark, and Tony glances up; he blinks as he sees Thor there, peeking around June, and then his face opens with great excitement.

“One of the dragons?” Thor asks, grinning. He doesn’t approach—smart of him.

Loki looks over his shoulder, but Tony looks down and laughs as the hatchling inside yelps, annoyed, and splits apart its egg with a great heave. Thor gets thrown out of Tony’s mind as he watches the hatchling inside push itself free of the shell pieces, huffing.

The Protector of Reality shuffles off its shell with strength and ease. They’re a little thing, smaller than June had been, but with stockier muscles and a broader chest; their scales are a glimmering ruby red, with transverse deep burgundy stripes that cut across their body from snout to tail tip. Oddly enough, their back is wingless—they have wing membrane, deep wine and translucent, connected to the inner line of their forelegs that stick out like a pterodactyl. As they move, the membrane shifts and sticks to itself.

The little hatchling squalls, indignant, as the air chills its wet wings and thin scales. Tony laughs, gentle, delighted with its energy.

“Eager to join us, then, little one?” Loki asks, smiling. He moves the shell of the eggs out of the hatchling’s nest as it flounders, stumbling over its own wings and long tail.

“Couldn’t wait another second, huh, matchstick?” Tony asks, laughing.

“Remind you of anyone, dear?”

“Ha, ha,” Tony says. He grins at the little hatchling before him, their head raised and nostrils flaring as Thor approaches, gentle and quiet; June watches him deliberately, and Váli’s limber body directs him when to stop before reaching the nest in its entirety.

“Go on, then,” Loki says, smiling. “It’s your turn again.”

Tony smiles. He reaches out and pets his hand down the hatchling’s little skull, feeling the bony nubs where horns—maybe antlers—will grow. Their scales are slimy and firm, chilled, as he pets down their neck and onto their back, across their spine. Matchstick yowls, mouth opening wide with tiny bright teeth, red tongue lolling.

“Hey, hey, it’s just me,” Tony laughs, gently touching at the side of their jaw. Matchstick tilts away, sniffing at him, and then lets Tony rub at their scales again. Touching them, feeling the way their body moves, the way their breath huffs—it sends Tony back to all those years ago, when a golden dragon hatched beneath the winking eye of a camera and two sets of capable hands. When June was nothing more than an infant, when the world was still as it had always been, before the best of Tony’s life had yet to find him.

Loki pets the new hatchling, thumbing at the wing membrane that clings to their heaving side. Matchstick huffs and twists, interested by the new touch. Thor draws closer and allows his brother to guide his hand down to the hatchling’s side, his palm flat against the heaving ribs. Thor’s face splits open with profound joy. When he pulls his hand away, it is unmarked.

And with the sight of Thor’s blank hand—Tony realizes his worst fear has come true. With Matchstick here, alive and awake and hatched, Tony will have to separate from June entirely until they’re old enough to be without a bond or they find their rider. Tony will undergo that same pain and devastation Loki did, and he will rarely—if at all—hear his baby girl’s voice for the next however many years.

He looks down at this little hatchling and for a moment, only sees dark times ahead.

“It’s just me, honey,” Tony says again, letting the hatchling pull away and lay its head down, exhausted, all its spitfire energy burned to ash. He lays his hand on their belly, which rises and falls with breath, and opens his mind to the new creature before him. “It’s just me.”


	2. Characteristics of The Absent Stark Father

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki has a couple of new lesson plans. June makes some mistakes and realizes she isn't as good of an older sister and she likes to think. Váli is just trying to have a good time, honestly. Matchstick grows into themselves and leaves anyone who can't keep up in the fucking dust, scrub.
> 
> And for the first time in a very, very long while, Tony is alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyyyyyyyy, so its been a hot second
> 
> my life got Complicated not long after i started this new story but now im back, hopefully to stay. with endgame under my belt im trying to get back into marvel projects, so we'll see how that goes. watch out for some bang/auction stories coming up in the next few months, im working on those, too simultaneously 
> 
> anyways, im not super pleased with this chapter, but its mostly exposition and set-up, so hopefully i'll enjoy writing the next chapters more. i hope yall like angst we are on the struggle bus for the long haul team buckle up
> 
> i might edit this come later chapters, just because i cant seem to get it right. ill let yall know in the notes if that happens lmao
> 
> anyways thank you SO much for sticking with this and coming back after all this time!! if you're new, welcome!! this is not a stand-alone, so please read the first in the collection if you're interested!! any feedback is appreciated i love yall very much xxxx
> 
> TW: depression/depressive symptoms
> 
> no endgame spoilers

When he wakes, Tony is very cold.

Shivers overtake him immediately, wracking through his ribs and his limbs. His chest aches; it hurts to breathe through the pain of the constant trembling and hard, heavy shivers. His muscles feel tight and pained like he’s been running, tensed up, never quite relaxing for hours on end.

He feels something touch him, drawing his attention; Tony opens his eyes, and Loki leans over him, eyes wide; his mouth is moving but Tony can’t hear the words over the blood pounding in his ears. He feels like shit, like withdrawal but ten times worse, like his whole body is shaking apart and his bones are shattering beneath his skin, like he’s never going to be warm, like something is taking from him, stealing the heat inside his gut—

“C-c-old, Loki,” Tony sobs. The tears are frozen in his eyes, and he knows his face is contorted, that it’s ripping apart at the seams of muscle and bone. “I’m c-cold, I can’t-t—Loki—Lok-ki—help-p me—”

Loki says something. He draws another blanket over Tony’s body, but it doesn’t help. Tony writhes beneath the weight, the sheets freezing against his skin, the sweat cooling on his arms and his temples, in his hair. Loki holds him still, and his hands are like pieces of ice; Tony shrieks, pulling away, but Loki doesn’t let him go, and he pulls against the points of contact, desperate for warmth, for the sensation that he’s not going to freeze into ice.

Loki moves his hand to Tony’s temple, cupping his face, meeting Tony’s eyes. He says something, says it again, but Tony can’t hear a word.

After a moment, darkness comes again.

*

The next time Tony wakes, his head hurts.

He shifts and sits up, grimacing. He feels like there’s coagulating blood weighing down the front of his brow, like there’s a lead weight right behind his eyes. Fuck, that hurts. The rest of his body hurts, too—tight and sore, and breathing sends sharp pains down his sides and across his sternum.

He feels Loki’s mind in his, lax with sleep. He turns and sees him asleep in the chair they drug in here when Loki was going through this, face pale and fingers laying across the line of Tony’s wrist. As he examines the internal place of his mind, feeling the new corners and the raised shields, he comes across the place where June once lived.

The bond is still there, but it’s stretched thin and sheer that he can barely feel it at all. The way it once was—foundational and strong and thick like corded steel—makes this…this tissue paper, floating-on-air connection pitiful in comparison. He can barely feel June’s warmth, now, barely can tell that she’s around. The only thing he can feel when he grasps it in his hands is that June is alive.

Alive. She’s alive. Tony covers his face and shudders with the grief of it. Shudders with the lonely emptiness of his head, the absence of warmth that connected him to something more, someone that loved him irrevocably. Of course she’s still there—alive, alive—but it’s not the same.

It may not be again.

*

On the first day in bed after the separation, Tony wakes up around seven at night and realizes Matchstick is in bed with him.

They’re settled in the curve of his stomach, head pressed against the hum of his arc reactor. He stares helplessly down at them, their red lovely scales, the barely-there protrusions of their horns, the wrinkled membrane of their wings. They’re so small.

It reminds him so viscerally of June that Tony starts to cry. Fat tears, silent and heavy, collect in the divot of his nose and stream down onto his pillow, dipping into the ugly contours of his twisted face. God, he wants her back. He wants her back so badly he wants to die. He needs her. He was going to be with her, forever; selfishly, terribly selfishly, he always thought—expected—to be the first one to die, so he would never have to live apart from them.

And now he is alone.

Tony can’t look at Matchstick anymore. He turns to his other side, his back to their sleep, and lays there in silence and in the grief of a separation he never thought to brace for.

*

Matchstick has trouble bonding.

Tony’s mind is as open and reaching as he can be, given how tender and aching and alone he is, but when he reaches back, they slip away from him like a bar of soap. Four days after they hatched—two after Tony and June separated—Matchstick grows weary and exhausted, sleeping far more now than June and Váli did when they were hatched.

June—oh, June—lays her great head next to them and reaches carefully for their mind, ever aware of the weight of her thoughts and the blunt way she has always touched other minds; she reaches for Matchstick and pulls the tendrils of their sleep-heavy mind and connects them to Tony, coaxing, gentle, leading them to water.

Matchstick does bond—a tenuous thing, so unlike June’s steady thing, even unlike Váli’s. But it is a bond. The next morning, Matchstick wakes Tony up by biting at his fingers like they were a chew toy—maybe a teething ring is more accurate—and that’s when Tony knows Matchstick will be okay.

*

The first day when he gets out of bed—Matchstick is a little more than a week old—he sits near the open dayroom curtain wall and watches June and Váli fly over the east woods.

Loki comes to settle in next to him after a while, content to read in silence. Tony’s glad. Their minds were firmly linked right after the separation, clasped in grief and a bog of loneliness so thick Tony drowns in it each night. Recently, they’ve had to take breathing room so they don’t drown in each other’s misery and grief, but with him here now, Tony can survive.

Matchstick watches their sisters fly, too, their beguiling emerald eyes—so like Loki’s it makes Tony’s heart race—tracking each movement, each turn and drop and lost feather. Their tail flicks in sympathetic counterweight strokes.

“Vivendel,” Loki says, ever naming their hatchlings after flowers from the long-dead Asgard. Matchstick turns to look at them, briefly distracted; their eyes flick back to track June’s body as she moves out of their visibility. “Would you like to sit with us?”

Matchstick looks back, head tilted. Tony watches them move, heart tight with the familiarity of their bright eyes, the curious tilt in their head. After a moment, they turn away and move closer to the glass, looking for another glimpse of June’s golden body. Tony’s fingers ache with the phantom pressure of a hatchling’s baby teeth. He does not feel much in his mind at all.

*

The month following Matchstick’s hatching and Tony and June’s separation is the toughest of Tony’s life.

The pain of loss and the sea of grief isolates him from his family—from the new life that he has worshiped and wished after for years. That new life sleeps in his home and sings in the night, the songs in his dreams. But loss has haunted Tony from the very start, the loss of childhood, of family, of normalcy, of trust; it haunts him now, when he thought himself immune.

Everyone suffers. Loki tries to pull him free, but he is not without responsibilities; Tony and June both encourage him to travel with Thor, looking for a new home for the refugees. He stays off-world for a week or more at a time, leaving Tony with June and Váli and Matchstick, a home of dragons that he can barely feel.

He tries to move past it. He does. But now he doesn’t have his coping mechanisms; he can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t fuck, can’t travel. All he can do is sit at the window and watch his children grow up without him. All he can do is dig into worthless projects and regret the time he wastes sleeping in late.

*

 _Beloved,_ Loki murmurs. It’s almost noon.

 _I can’t,_ Tony whispers. The blankets and comforter are so heavy against his body, weighted like lead. _Loki, I can’t._

_We need you today. Please, come for lunch._

_I can’t._

_Yes, you can,_ Loki whispers back. _June is taking the little ones wandering after we eat. You should come._

 _I can’t. I’m so tired. Go without me, okay?_ Even Tony’s mind feels like molasses, thick and deep and anesthetic, pulling him deeper. The place where June once lay is warm, lulling him down. He wants to resist, wants to pull away, but it’s a siren’s song of rest and respite from the loneliness and distant sun’s warmth.

_Get up, Tony._

Under Loki’s insistent and unyielding pressure, Tony heaves himself upright, leaning against the backboard. He’s sluggish, heavy, lolling, beyond his control, beyond his mood. God, he’s so tired. Loki presses his hand against Tony’s forehead, feeling his heat, the sluggish jump of his pulse.

_You’re ill, my love. This is not…_

_I don’t feel good. I’m tired, Loki…_

_Shh,_ Loki whispers. _Okay. I’m going to go speak with June. Go back to sleep._

_Loki, I…help me…I want to…_

_Okay, I hear you. I hear you. We will figure this out._

*

That night, Loki carries Tony to the dayroom and lays him in the crook of June’s chest and arm, laid beneath the wings he gave her.

June curls her head close to him. In the depths of his dreams, Tony hears, _my rider, my Tony_ , and the sloughing exhaustion that curdled beneath his skin burns away beneath the radiant heat of her mind. When he wakes the next morning, open and rested, he is encased in her golden scales, blanketed by feathered wings, and guarded by wizened emerald eyes.

June says to him, _I pulled too far from you, Tony._ Her eyes open and take him in, endless blue, bright and familiar and grief-filled. _It hurt to linger too close, but I went too far away in my desire to make it easier._

 _You hurt too,_ he says, feeling the memory of her own agonizing separation aching in her head. All this time, she has suffered; lonely, apart, too bulky and too different, too heavy to play and too old to want to. Oh, June.

_I will not make the mistake again. Forgive me, please._

_I would never blame you at all._

*

After that, things get easier.

Tony wakes easier, stays awake longer. His mind is warm with her presence. She can’t feel him, and he her, but the distant sun-warmth is there, accessible to his mind that cannot stand on its own without her.

Loki, too, seems to recoup; he rebounds more quickly than Tony, taking over daily tasks, teaching Váli and Matchstick magic, flying with June, cooking and communicating with friends and family alike to allay their fears.

But it has been around four months since Matchstick hatched, and Tony feels like he does not know them at all. He knows they are energetic, and bright, and wild, but he does not know the composition of their mind, the way their thoughts sing. He does not know how they like to sleep, or where, or when; he does not know how they prefer to play, or how fast they’re progressing in growth.

All he knows is that he wants to know them.

Váli turns out to be a wonderful steppingstone into reaching back into Matchstick’s life. She links the two of them enough that they start to spend time together without her. It’s hard, in a lot of ways. Tony feels awkward in ways he doesn’t know how to alleviate. He feels like a fucking distant father. He feels like his own dad.

Matchstick watches him when he does not think to look, when this unfortunate thought surfaces in his head.

When their eyes meet, they never look away.

*

Matchstick is—well.

They’re a wild child, is the nicest way to put it. Tony’s learning that very quickly.

They get into everything and anything; they pull Váli’s feathers from her wings out when she’s asleep and climbs through June’s antlers even when June tells them no, they get into Loki’s magic artifacts and turns themselves purple for a day and a half; they bite Tony’s tools and wires, and on one occasion give themselves a pretty nasty shock. They’re always climbing things, including their siblings and the riders; their favorite spot has become Tony’s head and shoulders, even when he’s too busy to try and balance a hatchling on his body.

Thor comes by one day and Matchstick goes wild, barely leaving him alone, eager like a puppy and as standoffish as a cat, barely letting him touch them before racing away only to return to bite at his fingers or rake their talons through his cape. Thor takes it like a champ, but Tony eventually gives him some peace by putting them outside with June, who stares balefully at him ten minutes later when Matchstick is gnawing at her ear, which is twice the size of the little one.

They’re definitely the most mobile out of the dragons. They’re always running or moving or hunting, eager with energy. Their words come slower.

But they do speak, thank God.

Of course their first word is _no._

*

Tony catches Matchstick in a rare nap one day, when he surfaces from his own distractions.

Their mind blossoms open when they’re asleep, like a moonflower, tenuous and certain. It takes Tony’s breath away, the breadth of their feelings and expansive mind, that at only a handful of months old, spreads out wide like a sun-swept prairie of grass and light and cloud-dusted contented sky.

They’re dreaming about flying, as far as Tony can tell. A wide field with safe forests on the edges, trees sprinkled in the gentle hills; rising above it, light, looking down onto green and green, above to bright blue, to falling white in the approaching of the first snow of the season. They’re dreaming of adrenaline and home.

They’re dreaming of a weight on their back and a warmth somewhere in their soul.

*

June isn’t on the lawn when he reaches the dayroom.

He heads to the coffee machine, craning his head to glance at the sky, but Loki intercepts him before he can brew a cup. Loki presses an insistent and slow kiss to Tony’s mouth, lingering until Tony smiles and pushes him away.

“Thor is with Vivendel on the front lawn,” Loki informs him, lingering close as Tony turns back to his coffee. “He’s insistent upon exploring that realm we found two weeks ago, so I thought to bring him over this morning.”

“He’ll just bother us until you go,” Tony agrees. “Go on, I’ll man the fort today.”

“Are you certain?”

Tony kicks him, fondly, in the shins. “No coddling.”

Code for: _too much affection will irritate me until I have a meltdown and avoid everyone for a couple of days._ Fuck that they need a code like that—the verbal confirmations of mental states, the thing they’ve _never_ needed—but with both Loki and Tony separated from June, and often incapable of lingering in each other’s minds for more than forty minutes without turning into a puddle of self-pity and grief, they’ve had to make…compromises.

Loki nods, acquiescing without complaint. “I’ll be off, then. Váli is in her east nest, and June went on a flight to the city to survey the changes in midtown—something about a new transport system that she’s interested in, I’m not entirely certain.”

“Architecture and urban planning fill the voids in her heart,” Tony bemoans, but with humor. Loki smiles and kisses Tony firmly before turning and disappearing towards the front of the compound to fetch Thor.

A handful of minutes later, he hears the Bifrost roar. As he settles in with his coffee, Matchstick comes trotting into the kitchen, tongue lolling. They’ve grown considerably in the past three months (seven months old already? Jesus _fuck_ ), but only come up to Tony’s shins still. Their thick, ram-like horns reach towards their snout, black and ribbed, still growing.

 _Do today?_ Matchstick asks, leaping up into Tony’s lap before he can dissuade them; Tony spills coffee down his front.

“Shit,” he curses, but Matchstick settles in, unrepentant. “No plans today, buddy.”

 _Flying then?_ Matchstick asks, ears perking high. They shift excitedly on Tony’s lap until Tony winces at the press of their talons into his thighs. He goes to push them off, but Matchstick whines and wriggles around Tony’s hand. _Stay! Flying!_

_Your nails are hurting me, buddy, come on._

_Nails?_ Matchstick repeats. They pause, mind turning over thoughtfully. A moment later, Tony has a lapful of small, wriggling child.

Tony stares down at his lap, dumbfounded. A little kid—that looks no older than a year old—stares back up at him with bright green eyes surrounded by dark skin, with these wild massive black curls springing outwards from their head. The kid is completely naked, butt planted across Tony’s thighs, tiny feet on chubby legs sticking straight out.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Tony hears his mouth say.

*

The very first thing Tony does is call Pepper, since Loki is off-world.

“Is June nearby?” he says just as Pepper picks up.

“I heard that she’s around Central Park,” Pepper replies. “Not within shouting distance.”

“Shit,” he says. “Uh, you wouldn’t happen to have any baby clothes at the office, would you?”

A palpable pause. “Tony. Why do you need baby clothes?”

Tony stares helplessly at Matchstick, who is teething at an unpeeled banana, their tiny body practically swimming in Tony’s sleep shirt as they perch on the kitchen counter.

“Would you believe me if I told you one of my dragons turned into a human kid?”

Another pause, this time that stretches for far longer. “Send me a picture, and I’ll be there in an hour.”

By the time Pepper makes her way to the compound, Matchstick changed back into a dragon and darted off into the vents where Tony can’t follow them without throwing out his back.

Pepper deposits three hundred dollars’ worth of baby clothes into his arms and says, “This is a new one, Tony.”

“Tell me about it,” he says, staring woefully at the place where Matchstick disappeared into the ceiling.

*

Loki kneels down in front of where Matchstick is gnawing on a cow bone.

“Vivendel,” he says. Matchstick looks up at him, interested. “Can you show me your other form, please?”

Tony hovers, intent, but trying not to show too much interest in case Matchstick gets spooked off. June, too, is watching from outside the dayroom, eye cracked. Váli stares from the rafters. Matchstick’s mind is simple in its wants: happy with the bone, content with the meat that is now in her belly, tired from the day of play, settled now that Loki is back.

Matchstick cocks their head and between one second and the next, that dark-skinned little kid is sitting in their place, the cow bone laid across their fat, naked legs. Loki blinks in surprise.

Matchstick laughs, bubbling and joyful; a child’s laugh. June’s head lifts from outside, head leaning closer to get a better look. The place where she once was warms briefly in Tony’s mind, and it sends a sharp pang of pain through Tony’s chest; he turns away, grimacing.

Matchstick stops laughing. When Tony looks back, they’re watching him, face pouting, mind tugging on his, insistent, as if to say: _look over here, no more sad, no rainclouds today._

Later on, they move outside once Váli and Matchstick are asleep and press their hands against June’s jaw, where she lays it on the ground to reach.

Tony says, _I told you it was instantaneous. Is that normal?_

 _No,_ Loki replies. _Abnormal, actually. Shifting between forms physically—not just through illusions—is terribly difficult. For Vivendel to be able to do so seamlessly is unheard of._

 _I believe it to be a characteristic of the Protector of Reality,_ June murmurs. She never speaks in her normal volume anymore. _Shi recalls Ogenhero frequenting the cities of their realm in many forms or preferring that of other races to their own natural body._

 _At least they’re progressing normally,_ Loki says after a moment of stilted silence.

 _At least_ , Tony echoes, but his mind is a million miles away.

*

Matchstick plants themselves right on Tony’s chest.

 _You aren’t mine,_ they say.

Tony looks at them for a long moment. Then he says, _you’re right._

_You’re July’s._

Tony sighs. _Yeah._

_Where’s the you that’s mine?_

_We don’t know._

_Why aren’t they here?_

_We don’t know that either, Matchstick._

Matchstick sits down firmly, tail twitching. Tony’s chest feels a little bit—suffocated. But he doesn’t move. _When?_

_Honey…_

They huff. _Why?_

_Because we don’t know how much longer you would have survived without hatching. Loki and I—we just…we’re looking after you until your rider comes. Does that make sense?_

_Mmm,_ Matchstick hums. _They stare at him. Alright. Until I find them, I stay with you?_

 _Yeah, buddy. With us._ He hesitates. _We’re your family,_ he says, softly. _I know I’ve been…distant, and sad, but I do love you. It’s very hard right now but it’s not your fault. Okay?_

Matchstick’s sharp green eyes take him in, the lines and fractures deepening their mind into something ancient and deep. For a second, Tony can see the dragon this hatchling will become: ancient and large and wise, powerful, with the powers of reality bending to their thoughts.

 _Okay,_ Matchstick replies. _Okay, Tony._

*

Tony has a downswing. He sequesters himself in their room and shuts the blinds because even catching a glimpse of June makes him ache and tremble.

Váli forces her way in on the third day and firmly lays next to him, tail and wings folded onto him in a comforting, animal weight. She stays with him for the next week that he spends in bed, always nearby, her mind an open and musical cavern that soothes away the nothingness that’s ringing in his head.

Tony runs his hands down her face on evening, looking at her without thinking about it. Her opal eyes open and take him in, and the gentle tide of her powers laps against him, but does not take and does not shift the overwhelming grief in his soul. He appreciates her being there over anything her innate powers could offer him.

“Thank you, darling,” he tells her, voice soft. “You’re very good. Thank you.”

*

Loki feels a prickling on the back of his neck.

He turns, overlooks the compound and its edges. There have been spies at their compound in the past; Earth’s irksome paparazzi, as Tony calls them; average onlookers, too, have crept the woods to try and catch a glimpse of the dragons that live here. But June quickly dissuaded more. This does not feel the same as it did then; similar, but this is…more primal. Loki considers waking Anthony, but his mind is so rarely at peace these days and he loathes to dredge him from it now when he is merely uncertain.

Nearby, June catches him looking and lowers her great head until he places his hand against her and their foundational connection blossoms forth.

_What is it, bonded?_

_I don’t quite know,_ he replies. _None of my wards are activated, but something…I can’t explain it. I feel as though there are eyes on us._

June’s bright eyes scan the same horizon his did. _I do not feel what you do. I can fly the perimeter, to appease your instincts?_

 _Just in case,_ Loki asks-agrees. The sensation has passed its peak, but he remains worried. _Are Váli and Vivendel inside?_

 _Yes. I can feel them_ —a pause, to ascertain exactness— _they are wrestling._

_Alright. If you wouldn’t mind—check this way, towards my back._

_Certainly._ June lifts her head and takes flight, the wind from her wings buffeting Loki strongly. He watches her survey the far forest edge, gliding close to the canopy. She examines the entire perimeter, far and close, but she returns with nothing grasped in her claws and no urgency in her mind.

 _I see nothing,_ June reports after their connection spirals open once more. _But I did feel a faint chill._

Loki’s mind immediately tracks to his blue skin Odin’s glamour hides. _What kind?_

_I have not felt it before. It was slight. It may have been a cold breeze on the wind for all I could tell—it was there and gone._

_Perhaps it was nothing,_ Loki says, his confidence in his instincts yellowing at the edges.

 _Perhaps it was not nothing,_ June counters. _I will sharpen my gaze._

*

Matchstick barrels around the corner way too fast and slides on the floor of the dayroom, slamming into the wall opposite with a great thud. Tony stands up, ready to intervene or pick them up, but Matchstick gets to their feet and continues to chase Váli across the room. The older dragon leaps over the couch Tony is sitting on, with all his papers and tools, and Matchstick follows by scrabbling over and leaping across, running over Tony’s lap— _ow!_ —before leaping down to reach Váli.

“Guys, guys!” Tony yelps. “Take it outside!”

Váli turns on a dime and flutters up to the rafters, spiraling around the edges in circles, escaping Matchstick’s range. But of course, Matchstick doesn’t stop; they barely hesitate as they leap towards the wall, shifting into a massive African cat with a spotted burgundy and brown coat, and begin to—climb up the wall?

“Hey, hey, no!” Tony calls. “No climbing! Matchstick! Hey!”

Matchstick somehow sticks to the wall, climbing up the side like the spider-kid that’s been popping up around Queens the past couple months. They get thirty feet up before they make a leap for the rafters, shifting into their draconic body mid-leap, wings extended.

And miss.

Tony lunges across the room and barely catches Matchstick in time, their wings buckling immediately under the pressure of the air; Matchstick yelps, and childish annoyance spikes across their bond; Matchstick says, _No, Tony!_ like it was Tony’s fault they fell.

And _fuck_ if that whole thing didn’t just send him careening back seven years and didn’t warm the back of his neck with Afghan sun.

“No climbing!” Tony yells, wrestling briefly with the hatchling before lifting them up by the midsection at arm’s length, staring them down. “Matchstick, _no!_ ”

Matchstick writhes and twists free, falling down to the ground with a great huff. They shake themselves free of whatever bad mojo Tony left on them and glare balefully at them before scrabbling away, sliding on the floor again, and leap outside to bother June.

*

Loki glances up from his spell-weaving. June has settled inside the dayroom, and the rest of them have congregated around her, drawn by her commanding presence and her warmth. Matchstick is currently watching Váli climb into June’s antlers and groom herself there.

“Vivendel,” Loki says, “Have you given more thought to your name?”

Vivendel turns to Loki, head cocked. They’ve grown steadily in the past month, strong and stocky, with their horns breaking through their skin; they’re growing in thick and dark, almost black. Through Anthony’s mind—theirs clasped so tightly now—Loki can hear Vivendel speak. _My name?_

“Yeah, it’s your choice, Matchstick,” Anthony says. “June and Váli picked their own names. So did your brother.”

_Brother? I have a brother?_

_Did, little one_ , June murmurs, without opening her eyes. She speaks through Tony’s hand, where it lays against her side. _He returned to sleep._

“His name was Atlas,” Loki says.

Vivendel tilts their head again, a curious wild animal. They turn back to June and Váli, examining them. Loki feels an interested prodding at their mind, a curious and prickly touch that Loki deliberately opens for so the hatchling can browse his memories, feel the stories he’s collected there.

Vivendel does the same to Anthony but returns to Loki’s mind after a moment or two, lingering on Thor, the memories Loki holds of him; his laugh, his fighting, the feeling of his hand in Loki’s. Vivendel seems smitten by the idea or the memories that Loki holds of his brother, ignoring the moments of pain or careless words or attempted regicide; Vivendel skims through them, interested, searching for something…more.

 _Ah!_ Vivendel says, pleased. June’s eye opens, and Váli ceases to groom, turning to them. _Yes. This one! Brynhildr._

 _Brynhildr?_ Anthony says, testing it out.

_Yes! That is me._

_It is very nice to meet you, Brynhildr,_ Loki says, warm.

_But you have known me?_

Anthony laughs. _It’s just what we say when we’ve chosen a name. You’re becoming who you’re supposed to._

 _Ah,_ Vivendel—Brynhildr—replies.  _But—hmm. That is it, but also different. Like July, and V. Maybe…_

June blinks her eyes and says, _a shorter form of this name? Bryn. Hill. Rin. Nilde. Nellie._

 _Nilde,_ Brynhildr says, thoughtfully. Their ears perk and they make a wonderful chirping sound in the depth of their throat. _Nilde! Nil…dah. Nilde! Yes. That is right. Nilde._

 _Nilde,_ Loki says. _Well, of course, it fits you wonderfully. Thank you for sharing this moment with us._

*

It becomes commonplace for the compound to ring with the shouts of “Brynhildr!” and “Nilde, no!” after that day, but it is comforting, in its own simple, unfamiliar way.

*

Loki witnesses Nilde shift seamlessly into what seems to be their preferred humanoid form—an elf, with dark skin and tightly coiled hair—and tilts his head, interested once more at the implications of the protector of reality’s powers. Nilde gets to their feet and uses their smaller, softer body to squeeze into the ducts their horns have grown too wide to fit within. They’re almost ten months old.

Anthony feels his interest. Their minds are linked today, both of them filled more with light than black emotions, and so when Loki turns over the newly forming memory in his head, Anthony glances up from his leatherwork across the dayroom table.

_What is it?_

_I wonder if the others could learn this skill._

_Shifting?_ Anthony clarifies.

Loki sends a sensation of agreement. _It is beyond most mortals without centuries of practice, but dragons are different, what with their sources of magic. Perhaps if Brynhildr was able to tutor them, or explain…_

_Why would they need to? Seems to me being a dragon would be the best thing to be, if we’re talking options._

_For safety, is my major concern,_ Loki admits. _If they can shift into smaller bodies—humanoid bodies—then we could better hide them. Especially June._

 _Huh,_ Anthony replies. They sit back from their work to track the visible dragons before them; June, a distant silhouette in the cloudy sky, Váli asleep in her rafter nest, and then the audible clangs from Nilde as they traverse the ducts within the walls. _Maybe you’re right. You think they’re in enough danger we’d ever have to hide them, rather than fight it out?_

 _I don’t know,_ Loki replies. He meets Anthony’s eyes. _But I’d rather have the option. Especially with the pearl egg, and with the growing awareness of dragonkind’s rekindling across the Universe…I have heard stories of dragon-hating societies, but they are just as much stories as anything regarding the ancient dragons._

 _I’m with you,_ Anthony says, soothingly. _I think it’s a good idea. If they can learn it, might as well. Might help them when we’re not around anymore._

Loki replies with a sensation of agreement and vague, distant grief; an emotion of what will come, not quite realized. _I’ll speak with June, when she returns._

*

Loki finds that June is not as keen to the idea as he and Anthony are.

 _I have no need of it,_ she sniffs. She is speaking very quietly, as though afraid to wake Váli through Loki’s opaque mind.

 _Not this instant, no, kusymre,_ Loki agrees, fondly. _But you may. You are very big now for earth, and very—conspicuous. There may be a time you need to blend in, for whatever reason. Would it not be safer to have the tool rather than want for it?_

June huffs. They make as though to shake their head, but stop themselves before the action would lift her jaw away from where Loki has pressed his palm to her scales, their singular point of connection. _Fine, since it is so important to you,_ she cedes, rather ungraciously.

_Our next lesson, then?_

_Yes, yes,_ June agrees, hurrying the topic away. _Now tell me of Váli._

*

Váli takes to shifting well enough. They struggle for the first lesson, but quickly gain traction and begin to change into similar species of dragons by the beginning of the second and into other mythic species by the third. As far as Loki can translate, she doesn’t not relish it, but will shift when it is beneficial for her to do so.

June takes being tutored by Nilde about as well as anyone could expect. Which is badly.

It’s not so much she doesn’t think Nilde is capable of interesting and difficult feats of magic; it’s not even she does not think it worthwhile. Rather, as far as Tony and Loki can tell, she simply does not want to learn it at all.

For a dragon that has struggled with very little and has been tutored in the arcane arts since she was a hatchling, she cannot seem to grasp the concept of changing her body in the slightest. They even disable and remove her nanite wings, thinking the nonbiological components might be dissuading her magic from diverting, but that doesn’t seem to help at all.

June grows frustrated very quickly, badly enough that she turns one day and snaps her jaws at Nilde when they press jokingly against her as a large, dark cat. Nilde leaps away and darts into another room entirely, fur raised, and it takes Tony going in himself and coaxing them out until they’ll be in the same room as June during lessons after that.

But she doesn’t stop. Which is something. At this point, Loki and Tony will take _any_ optimistic signs at all.

*

Birthdays come and go. Loki turns a number he barely remembers; Tony turns 48 during a quiet party, during which he celebrates by laying on the lawn with June and indulging in a short night of connection with her which makes both of them ache; June turns eight; Váli turns three; Nilde reaches one.

The pearlescent egg doesn’t hatch. She is much older than the rest of them, and still, she sleeps on.

On a distant realm, in the foundations of a new home for Asgard, Thor reaches his own birthday. He sends them a picture of a selfie with the last Valkyrie and a hulking figure made out of rocks, and the picture doesn’t come through until Thor lands on Earth to do some shopping.

*

 _Take me out today!_ Nilde insists.

Tony, since his back is to Nilde, allows himself to release a great, silent sigh as he shrugs on his suit jacket. Loki’s just returned from a trip with Thor, so he’s entertaining his brother in the dayroom and distracted enough that Tony can’t signal for help.   _Nilde…_

 _I will be human!_ They quickly compromise. _I will not leave your side. But I want to go! Meet my rider!_

 _They might not even be human, Matchstick,_ Tony replies, off-topic, because this is quickly shaping up to be a hard conversation and he doesn’t want to deal with it. _Not even on Earth._

 _You don’t know that,_ Nilde rebuts. When Tony turns, they are standing in a wide stance, still draconic, head up and eyes flashing. _They might be here! Waiting! Wandering down the street where you will be. Fate! Please, Tony!_

Tony takes a deep breath in. _It’s not safe,_ he begins. It’s not that Tony doesn’t _want_ Nilde to find their rider; actually, the opposite, what with the pearl egg still suspended in the workshop, and their mental real estate open for another bond dwindling rapidly. But Tony wants Nilde safe more than anything.

 _With you I am safe,_ Nilde replies, cutting him off. _You and July and Loki saved the Universe! I am safe with you._

_Have you learned to fly since the last time you asked?_

Nilde’s ears flick down. _No…_

_And what’s the rule for hatchlings leaving the compound?_

Nilde’s voice grows annoyed. _I have to know how to fly. But, Tony—_

 _It’s the rule, Nilde,_ Tony says, ever the enforcer. They devised this rule when Nilde first hatched and showed signs of being a rowdy one. Váli has left the compound on several occasions, but has never asked to leave on their own accord, which makes this rule almost directly targeted at Nilde.

_But I will not be a dragon, I will be human! And humans cannot fly. This isn’t fair, Tony. I want my rider!_

_I know you do—_

_You have yours! I want mine!_

_I want you to find yours too, Nilde—_

_Then let me go with you!_

_It’s not safe!_

_When am I ever safe? Will I ever be? This isn’t **fair** —_

_Stop, Nilde!_ Tony snaps. Nilde’s mind abruptly shuts to him, startled. _Enough. You’re not coming with me. I have to keep you safe. There’s no chance your rider is in New York, let alone that you’ll run into them today, or get close enough to touch you. And the chance you could get hurt, or lost, or kidnapped—it’s much higher, and I won’t risk it._

Nilde’s mind grows stormy, the bedrock grumbling. _You don’t want me to find them,_ they accuse.

Tony balks.

_You won’t let anyone ever touch me, even if they’re my rider, just so you can have me all to myself until you shrivel up into nothing. You don’t want me to find them because you can’t have July._

“Nilde!” Tony calls, appalled, his mind suddenly and painfully shut out from Nilde’s as they slam the connection shut and scrabble away.

“Anthony?”

Tony jerks. Loki is standing right in front of him, as though he’d teleported there between one blink and the next. Tony’s teeth hurt; he’s clenching his jaw. He feels as though no time at all has passed but by Loki’s expression he has a feeling a great deal of it has gone.

“There you are,” Loki says, concerned, soft. “You were very blank. Are you okay, beloved?”

“I—” Tony says, through the lockjaw. He swallows. Shoves the memories of what happened in Loki’s direction, barely able to comprehend them at all. His ears are ringing even though Nilde can’t speak.

Loki pales. A sympathetic response. His hand clasps around Tony’s wrist and his mind sidles up alongside Tony’s, a gentle pressure that alleviates this great, pounding pressure that leaves him feeling breathless.

 _They are lonely_ , Loki whispers, a consolation, an explanation of Nilde’s cutting words.

 _So am I,_ Tony responds, before he can snap the words back.

*

June manages her first transformation the day after the Nilde incident. She shifts into what seems to be a smaller, lither high dragon, but does not have wings.

She considers it a mixed success personally but hypes her excitement up to try and distract Tony from his obvious black mood. It doesn’t work as well as she wanted it too.

*

There’s nothing that changes.

Time passes excruciatingly slowly and all too quickly. Sometimes years pass and it has only been an hour; sometimes Tony glances away and weeks have passed. He feels apathetic to its changes. Cold beneath the spring-summer-fall sun.

Tony looks up one day and sees Nilde flying above the lawn, circling like a bird-of-prey, and blurts out, “when did they learn to fly?”

Váli looks at him. Their black, opal eyes are almost sad. He feels a familiar tickling at his mind; her powers, aching to soothe the pain in his soul. He doesn’t have to rebuff her because she resists the temptation to make him hurt less on her own—she’s long learned their boundaries.

“Two weeks ago, darling,” Loki replies. He hesitates. “You were—resting. I brought them into the city three days ago—remember?”

Tony watches them dive and use their arm strength to shift the membrane of their wings enough to catch the upsweeps of the wind and curl up into a messy spiral, towards the sun’s peak. They seem very determined. He feels very, very numb.

Nilde senses him watching and turns around, laboriously flapping their pterodactyl wings. Their landing is less graceful than their turns, but they don’t break anything and only seem to be on the good side of drained.

 _July says I am getting much better,_ Nilde offers. They have long since moved past their last…confrontation. Tony has not. _V has been teaching me_

There is a very loud sound. Something familiar—a pop, but a bang, too loud in Tony’s ears, oddly distant. There’s pressure. A sensation like a punch in his shoulder.

Then there is blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :shrug emoji:
> 
> uh oh
> 
> so, preemptive notes: june is deliberately mostly absent from this chapter, to reflect the distanced bond. vali, since she is connected to loki, is also absent since tony feels isolated from her and loki, too.
> 
> no major character death, i promise. im not here for that kind of angst i swear. apologies for any typos/missed+extra italics, i did my best to comb for them but they always get through. plus if i used they/them for someone other than nilde; i caught that a few times too
> 
> pronoun list for the primary colors gang:  
> tony, loki: he/him/his  
> june, váli: she/her/hers  
> nilde: they/them/theirs
> 
> thank you again!! leave a kudos if you liked and a comment if you have any feedback i thrive off the stuff xx

**Author's Note:**

> here we go
> 
> uhhhhhhh be prepared for some Angst next time, and i'm sorry but also not so sorry, i already played my Thanos card so the pain has to come from somewhere u know
> 
> since tumblr is dying, i made a [twitter.](https://twitter.com/AdvisedPanic) come talk to me im begging you
> 
> OH here's a fanart i bought at the marvel trumps hate auction, by cruria!! check their other work out too, they're amazing to work with AND do amazing work!! [Here it is!](https://cruria.tumblr.com/post/180215209137/a-picture-i-drew-for-advisedpanic-the-first)
> 
> anyways thank you again, i love you, comment and subscribe and kudos the ever loving fuck out of me please, and see you next time xxx


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